#Sincere: Let's talk about therapy

“Hey! Sorry I can’t chat, I’m late to this doctor’s appointment,” I said to my roommate as I rushed to grab my keys and run out the door.

“Oh no! Feel better! Being sick this early in the semester sucks,” she said.

I nodded and thanked her for her thoughtfulness.

I got in my car and set the GPS to my therapist’s office. And I wondered why I’d told her that half truth.

I have a fun thing called generalized anxiety disorder that gives me nightmares, waves of nausea and panic attacks at random times. It’s a pretty common disorder, and I’ve been coping with it since I was a child.

I don’t talk about my mental illness often because I worry people will treat me like I’m fragile, or be afraid of me, since according to popular narrative, people with mental health problems are violent and erratic. The truth is, my anxiety disorder is part of me but not all.

My anxiety disorder sucks. It means that I sometimes have to leave class and sit in the bathroom trying to calm down for several minutes. It meant that during my first year, it felt impossible to get out of bed and go to class.

There isn’t much that’s more scary than waking up in the middle of the night to a tidal wave of nausea and panic.

There is a scene at the beginning of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" where the dementors enter Harry, Ron and Hermione’s train compartment and everyone feels fear and sadness, but Harry is the only one who passes out. He doesn’t know why these things affect him so much, and that unknowability, the fact that these creatures could come and incapacitate him at any time, is deeply terrifying.

This is what it felt like for me to deal with mental illness in high school. Everyone was stressed, but what happened to me felt more scary and mysterious.

But that changed my senior year of high school. I still had panic attacks throughout the week. But I met a couple of friends who opened up about their struggles with anxiety and depression.

And I realized that this is OK to talk about. I could text a friend and tell them I was having an anxiety attack. I didn’t have to keep it inside; I could tell them about funny moments in therapy or an awful dream I’d had the night before. Talking about anxiety with friends in the lunchroom made it less alarming. The dementors were still lurking around corners, but with the help of my friends, I knew the spells needed to push them back.

So here’s my new goal: to stop saying “doctor’s appointment” when what I mean is “therapy.” I don’t want or need to explain my anxiety to every person I meet, but I do want signal to others that therapy, like mental illness, doesn’t have to be a big scary mystery.